Stellarium is a cross platform desktop application for visualising astronomy. You can find out more on the web site.

We chose Stellarium because it has an outwardly complex appearance and interface, with multiple platform, supports scripting and massive amounts of configuration.

Since it was held towards the end of December we made it festive. Alan came disguised as one of Santa’s helpers. James was attacked by a science fiction luminous snake-like alien part of the way through. Steve had a tiny Christmas tree on his desk that no-one could see. And we replaced Tony on this webinar with “Captain Tiny Blue Alien”.

James and Steve had more domain knowledge than Alan. So they were able to observe different things.

Alan configured the application to work through a proxy so he could view the traffic, this allowed him to comment on some of the search issues that Steve describes.

Alan worked with Mac, VMs, and Windows. Steve chose Windows. James picked Mac.

We found enough in very similar areas of the application so none of us used any advanced features of the application.

If you haven’t tried the application, we thoroughly recommend it. Aside from the incredible visualisations and animations you’ll see. You also get a chance to wrestle with a highly individual GUI and it offers testing challenges that other apps don’t.

We enjoyed certain features of the application from a testing perspective: